8 comments:

Now those were some of the worst looking (space) helmets I've ever seen! But disregarding their design, they didn't seem very practical either. If you'd hit your head, which is what I assume it mainly guards against, then the little light thingy on top of the helmet would probably break. And if it guards against radiation instead, then still, what's up with that? Or the extension on the front, a scanner wouldn't be very useful if you couldn't see the information it picks up.

Disney's wholesale endorsement of von Braun's concepts mirrored the enthusiastic embrace of those plans by the government and industry. And yet it has to be remembered that von Braun was directly responsible for the deaths of 15,000 people - 10,000 of whom were slave laborers - because he himself enthusiastically embraced the Nazi regime and all its resources. Von Braun was remarkably indifferent as to what uses his research was put so long as he could do that research.

The freaky thing about this movie is that it anticipated that a hole in the hull of the ship might occur, as the result of an impact, and it portrayed the astronauts as well able to go outside and do repairs on their ship.

This was forgotten by NASA by the time the Columbia mission, so the astronauts died.

Anonymous, I take your point about von Braun. But it wasn't just the space plans that were enthusiastically embraced here.

Remember, at the time of the Disney show he had been working for years (and would be working for several more) on our ICBM descendants of the V-2. By the mid-1960s, we and the USSR had built systems capable of dispensing many, many World War IIs' worth of death and destruction in less than an hour. Those systems still exist, although most worry about them less. Your taxes and mine maintain them. But hey, that's cool, because no slave laborers were harmed in our version.

I submit that rather than feeling virtuous as we pile onto callous, amoral Wernher von Braun, we think more in terms of the old Pogo line: